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Political art by painter Kaya Mar

20th Oct 2015: Prelude to the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement

The political air was buzzing with excitement, and smelled distinctly of bitter acrimony following the House of Lords’ infamous rejection of Chancellor George Osborne’s planned cuts to Family Tax Credits which had been announced ahead of the 2015 Autumn Budget. Osborne, Cameron et al were fuming at the humiliation, and took to the airwaves to mutter darkly about revenge on the Lords, but nevertheless, George Osborne was sent back to his dank lair at the Treasury to re-think the whole lets-cripple-the-low-paid-peasants idea, as it became crystal clear to the entire nation (and a very vocal cohort of rebellious Tory back-benchers) that there was a stark disconnect between the incessant Tory sloganeering about “Hard Working Families” and “Making Hard Work Pay”, and the reality which was that a couple of million poorly-paid “Strivers” were about to be punished painfully by the very party who had weeks earlier tried to claim that they represented the working man.

The Barclay brothers dutifully rode to Osborne’s rescue ahead of the budget with a glowing piece praising Osborne and claiming that despite the fact that he had just been prevented from causing severe hardship to millions of the “Working Poor”, in fact the general public was still very keen to stick the boot into the disabled, the sick and the unemployed.

To illustrate the article the Telegraph revived a photo of Kaya Mar with his 2015 Summer Budget painting of George Osborne, which was jolly decent of them: